Street Fight Daily: Group Commerce Layoffs, Mayer Talks Location

A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.

Group Commerce Has Laid Off 28% Of Its Staff (Business Insider)
Group Commerce, an e-commerce platform for publishers that made its name in the daily-deal market, has fired 31 people. The employees were located throughout six cities and worked on everything from sourcing deals for publishers to operations – all were in the local services department.

What Multilocation Brands Need to Do to Prepare for Facebook’s Graph Search (Street Fight)
Rob Reed: National brands have invested nearly all their Facebook resources in building and supporting brand pages for the purpose of publishing content and managing customer relationships at the corporate level. But these brands don’t do business at the corporate level.They do business at the local level through large, brick-and-mortar networks. When it comes to Graph Search, these physical locations and their corresponding local Facebook pages are what really matter.

Is Foursquare on Marissa Mayer’s Silicon Alley Shopping List? (BetaBeat)
There’s been a lot of speculation about Foursquare, and now from the World Economic Forum in Davos comes reason to wonder whether another Silicon Valley giant might have its eye on the Silicon Alley starlet. In an interview with Bloomberg Television’s Erik Schatzker, Yahoo CEO Mariss Mayer said that location-based services are among the most exciting in the technology industry.

Bringing SMB Point-of-Sale Systems to the Cloud (Street Fight)
Steven Jacobs: The introduction of SaaS POS has broad implications, not only for payment firms like Square, but also a host of other loyalty and lead generation start-ups that have worked to tie into the point of sale over the past 18 months. It brings scalable access to real-time data on nearly every inch of local retailers’ operations, not only accelerating existing sectors like loyalty and rewards but opening new opportunities for key services like live inventory search.

Keith Rabois Talks About Sexual Harassment Claim, Becoming a “Distraction” at Square and What’s Next (AllThingsD)
“At the end of the day, this is personally embarrassing to me, because when anyone’s life is exposed to a public forum, it creates quite a damaging situation,” said Rabois. “As we looked at it, it was going to become a distraction that was going to hurt the company.”

Why Hyperlocal Websites like New Raleigh Can’t Make Money Online (Indy Week)
Will Huntsberry: Three years ago, media analysts were calling community-driven websites (“hyperlocal” in media parlance) such as New Raleigh the trend to watch. And yet local websites haven’t filled the information void at the same rate newspapers have emptied it.

Time Spent In Retailers’ Mobile Apps Grows More Than Five-Fold In A Year, Flurry Finds (TechCrunch)
Consumers spent six times as much time in retailer apps in December compared to a year earlier, showing that shopping and commerce is finally beginning to take off on mobile platforms. Even though Daily Deals apps like Groupon, which have spent millions on user acquisition, have seen their market share fall, they still saw the time spent metric at least double.

Drivers Would Rather Use Their Smartphones Than Mediocre Built-In Navigation Systems (Business Insider)
In a survey by J.D. Power and Associates, 46 percent of respondents said they “definitely would not” or “probably would not” repurchase a navigation system from the manufacturer, if they had the option of displaying their smartphone navigation on a central screen in the car.

Converting Facebook SMB Pages to Websites (Local Onliner)
BIA/Kelsey data from our Local Commerce Monitor shows that more than 40 percent of U.S. SMBs have Facebook pages. Many, however, still don’t have standalone websites.